Like all money transfers services, Western Union also has its limitations and downsides of sending and receiving money. While most transfers through Western Union make it totally fine. There are some that can have trouble in the process.
If there is an issue with a transfer. You will encounter some mysterious error codes that don’t tell you much of what is wrong and how you fix it. One of the most common error codes for Western Union Customers is R7008 and R7009.
Today, we explore what both of these error codes mean and what you can do to get rid of them.
What are Error Codes in Western Union
Western Union’s advanced money tracking and payout system is designed to inform you if anything goes wrong with a transfer in the form of an error code. The error codes usually start with a letter and have 4 digits following it. An example is R7009 or R7008.
The letters at the beginning of the error can indicate the nature of the issue example: any codes starting with the letter R indicate an issue with compliance, the letter T indicate there might be a technical issue.
Any error code that appears is far from self-explanatory. Since it’s just a bunch of random numbers and an alphabet.
The error codes are to be decoded by the customer care team at Western Union.
What is the Compliance Team at Western Union
Compliance is a tier 2 department in Western Union. It is not directly accessible to customers. The compliance team works with other departments to make sure every financial transaction is being carried out in the boundaries of Western Union’s TOS and the financial laws and regulations that have to be followed in the countries they do business in.
In simple terms, the compliance team decides if a transfer should go through or be blocked for certain reasons.
What Does Error Code R7008 and R7009 Mean?
Description: “Western Union is unable to approve your money transfer due to some compliance and regulatory reasons. To ensure future transfers go through. You would have to go through a re-evaluation. Please note the re-evaluation does not guarantee the decision will be reversed, only that it will be reviewed.”
The error codes R7008 and R7009 mean that you are blocked from sending or receiving money. The ban imposed associated with these codes indicates that any future transfers you make will also be banned.
What Is the Reason for this Ban?
No matter how hard you try to dig into the reasons for the ban. Western Union will never share the exact cause of why this happened.
All they will ever tell you is that the ban is caused due to some compliance and regulatory concerns, which exact concern is the ban related to? Nobody knows.
I’ve worked as a Western Union customer support agent for about a year. The reason we are unable to share the exact reason for the ban is because even the customer support agents don’t have this information. This information is only kept within the compliance team. Which can obviously annoy a lot of customers because they don’t know what patterns or behaviors to avoid to prevent getting banned in the future.
Solution:
The only solution or workaround Western Union has for this issue is a re-evaluation request. You can send an email to the compliance team to process a re-evaluation request for you. I have written a whole article on the re-evaluation process. You can read it here.
